5 Mistakes I Made In My First Few Years As an Independent Artist

Good morning, hope you are having a great start of the day. Let’s start off nice and negative with this first episode of the self made sound podcast. Today I’m gong to share with you 5 mistakes I made in my first few years as an independent musician. There’s probably more but these came to mind this morning. I think it’s good for me to document this so I can remind myself to not repeat these and maybe it will help you not make those mistakes and hopefully that can help make your journey a little easier.

1. Talk negative about success

So this one is quite personal, but when I first started to get numbers. I wasn’t in a good place mentally. I was dependent on alcohol and substances and frankly didn’t like myself. Subconsciously I didn’t feel like I deserved success and felt like I kind of cheated the game. The numbers came from Spotify playlists for study music and not from a base of raging fans. In my eyes it wasn’t cool and artsy to get big numbers in a way that wasn’t organic. I even made a public statement on instagram one time, around the time of the year when everyone shared their Spotify numbers. In that statement I said something like yeah I’m not gonna share my numbers, because these numbers don’t count and it’s not about numbers. And sure, I still think it’s not healthy to flex your numbers all the time, no one likes that. But I could’ve been thankful and rolled with it. My advice now to everyone is to, if you have some success, just be thankful and roll with it. Because in that statement, what was I saying to my audience, and the people I worked with? Was I saying that my music doesn’t deserve a lot of streams? That they shouldn’t listen to my music? That they shouldn’t work with me? Why was I making enemies out of people who just want to celebrate that their song has a million streams. I can see that if you send out messages like this, people don’t really want to work with you. I don’t know if there’s people that stopped fucking with me because of that, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

2. Spend money but not invest money

So the first money that I earned with music streams was a lot for me at the time. And what did I do with it? Blow it! Keep in mind that I wasn’t in a healthy place mentally at that time so a lot of money got spent on partying, alcohol, drugs, and other ways to escape, you name it. I don’t regret it, this is where I was at at that time and I had to learn these lessons. But if I look back now, a lot of money seemingly just disappeared. And that’s money that could’ve been invested in things that would help me further. I could’ve gone and learn new skills with that money, I could’ve gone and get awesome new gear with that money, even if I would’ve just bought gifts for all my friends with it that would’ve been a better investment than what actually I did with it. Also, in the first year of earning this money. I didn’t think about the fact that I had to pay tax over it. That made me realise that a lot of it wasn’t actually mine to keep. But I learned that money you invest, you can deduct from your profit at the end of the year and so you have to pay less tax. And invested money isn’t lost, you get to keep it. Because if it’s a good investment, the value stays in the thing you invested in. It even increases.

3. Break Consistency

So at some point it started to get a little more difficult to have the same success as before by just releasing independently because of two reasons. Labels started entering the game and had more connections and power and either had their own big playlist or had bigger chance to get playlisted. Second is that the game started to get saturated with a lot of talented people. A lot of people know how to make sick beats. My response to this wasn’t to create my own lane, step my game up and keep consistent with releasing music that I loved. In stead of that I became kind of discouraged and I stopped releasing. Where would I have been now if I didn’t stop? Who knows, but I’m sure it’ll be a lot further than where I am now. So I think breaking consistency kills the momentum, especially in this time where songs are consumed like content. I kind of killed my momentum when I started hating on the game, my advice now would be to not hate the game.

4. Try to be someone else

When the game changed my attitude towards making music kind of changed as well. At first I never really made music with an end result in mind. It was just free creation. It became what it became and if I liked it, I would upload it. But I kind of got addicted to the numbers, and since they became less I started to try to change my sound a bit, trying to make it sound more like the music that other people did, the music that would work well. But obviously if you try to copy someone, they are going to be better at it than you. So copying people is not going to work, and it’s going to cause frustration because it doesn’t work. And that in it’s turn is going to negatively impact the quality of your music and your life. At least in my case. Also, I strongly believe that if you stay true to yourself, it might take a bit longer but the success will be longer lasting because the people who love you love you for you. And not because you happen to make music that fits a sound that’s popular at that moment.

5. Have high expectations

So what would happen to me a lot is that I would release a song. And then if it didn’t do well, I would get disappointed and then discouraged. And start to question myself. Also my definition of a song “doing well” changed because of the numbers that my earlier music got. But anyway, I let it impact my mood. And I’m not saying that it’s weird that the way your art is received impacts your mood, I think every artist has that to some extend. But to let it completely control your sense of self-worth is a bit silly. Especially because most people only like something if a lot of other people already like it. So the fact that your art doesn’t have a huge reception in itself doesn’t mean anything. I found, if I released something that I like and I completely let go of all expectations, I’m good. Every little appreciation of my song after that feels like a bonus. I can’t control what people think, but I can choose not to make a lack of praise mean that I’m not good. What also helps me a lot is if I just plan many releases ahead, this makes me less emotionally dependent on if this one song does well or not, because I already have the next 10 in the pipeline. This work has been done, my mind is occupied by the next thing.

So in conclusion. What would I do differently? Well let’s just turn the things that I talked about around so I would: 1. Talk positive about success

2. Invest money and not spend money so much

3. Stay consistent

4. Don’t try to be someone else

5. Drop expectations and just go.

Thank you for your attention, and listening to this, this was my first ever podcast episode, I hope you liked it.